Some of the academic folks I know have had a bit of trouble installing Linux/390 (<----- ibm's linux/390 developer page), but linux390.marist.edu/ has a decent manual they've found helpful.
Of course, it'll long be obsolete before I ever get my hands on one of these beasts. *sigh*
By which I mean the federalism issues raised on all sides. The current administration supposedly believes very strongly in principles of federalism. The current supreme court has come down recently in favor of federalism. So the Federal government will just do its thing and let the states go ahead and do their thing, right?
Unfortunately, no. If there's one thing the current administration believes even more strongly in than federalism is political power to override such matters of principle when a pet interest is implicated. If the feds aren't going to break Microsoft up, you can bet they're going to do everything in their power to make sure that their will isn't obviated by some ragtag liberal states like New York or California (both of which voted for Gore).
It's going to be one hell of a political grudge match ahead. The trenches have already been dug; we'll have to see who's the first to start lobbing chlorine gas.
Whenever booms like these arise, it's a great opportunity for students to cast down the shackles of academia and strike it out on their own. For years, it was entirely possible for young people to forgo college careers altogether and give of themselves fully in the high-tech industry.
But now that it's over and they're coming back to academia, the viscious cycle begins anew. These students, once they graduate, will have both classroom experience and real-world experience, and it'll simply raise the bar for everyone else. The choice for students arrived from outside the dotcom market will be between either taking time off and taking significant internships during their student years or simply go for more education (most will choose the latter). It'll be an upward spiral of higher education begetting better qualified workers begetting a need for higher education.
That's why it's critical, now more than ever, that we abolish universal education. Darwinian sociology tells us that the best will lead no matter what their headstart, so we should do away with unnecessary artificial government intervention in the education markets. Starting from a young age, children should be given strong incentives to go into factory work or indentured servitude, thereby setting a sufficient hurdle that only the truly motivated will enter primary and higher education.
The dotcom boom and bust was an important economic moment in history, but let's not let ourselves lose track of the bigger picture. Education is, one of the most important determining factors in people's quality of life, but we must not allow ourselves to overvalue its function or be irresponsible in its delivery.
There will always be a place for young people to go instead of university. The sooner we pull out of this economic slump, the better for these people.
``The thing that impressed me the most is that it's a full Outlook client,'' he said, meaning the computer can have receive e-mail without relying on a desktop or laptop computer.
What kind of compatibility are we talking about here? Is this a fully functioning version of Outlook? What I mean is, if I equip my entire production staff with these devices, can I expect to lose billions of dollars with full compatibility with Outlook viruses? I have to ask, because a few billion here and a few billion there really make a difference, you know, and if my company doesn't start losing time and money like our competitors, then my job as CIO just isn't secure.
I think I'll wait and see until Microsoft promises 100% Outlook virus compatibility. Call me conservative, but that's my honest judgment.
If a camel is a horse designed by committee
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
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· Score: 3, Funny
Then USB 2.0 is a duckbilled platypus.
Everyone, sing after me:
Let's slap together a bunch of features onto a product never intended to provide them!
Hey!
Let's win this battle on the marketing field rather than the technical merits!
Hey!
Let's leverage our existing monopolies to create new ones!
Hey!
What's the "SB" in USB stand for? Serial Bus? No! Super Bandwidth!
Hey!
Microsoftisn't going with USB 2.0; that alone should give pause. And what's the roadmap for the future? A present negligible superiority is all well and good for the moment, but how much can they expect to increase it as IEEE 1394 plods ahead? Not terribly much.
*Sigh*
Implications for alpha?
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 4, Interesting
While Compaq hasn't done much with Alpha since it bought out Digital, there was always that hope that something new would eventually come out. Alpha was a lovely chipset for all of its thermal and pricing issues (which could've been solved by a company with more drive and fewer pitfalls than Digital/Compaq had.)
But now that HP is buying Compaq, any life that could've possibly been breathed back into Alpha is completely dissipated. HP is firmly in bed with Intel on the Itanium line (fronting cash, codevelopment, independent liscensing, etc.) Whereas Compaq hadn't had much incentive to improve Alpha, HP has exactly zero interest, since that would mean directly competing with and undermining the success of Itanium.
The polite course of action would be to release Alpha completely into the public domain, but that's a farcically utopian request. I'm just always saddened when competition is reduced and choices are constrained. Let's just hope Apple and the PPC line don't go bust in the near future, leaving us with absolutely no alternative to Intel's offerings (which are beginning to look more and more like crap as the years pass) and AMD's parallel offerings in the same architecture.
Just last month, Microsoft changed the service agreement for their passport system to require only an email address and password to sign up. Did Microsoft do this without any armtwisting? No. Did they do it, though? Yes.
Just keep the pressure on them up. They're going to go ahead with some sort of service no matter what, but the amount of opposition they face now will determine how many of these concessions will be made "voluntarily". That way, even if the FTC doesn't come down with a favorable ruling, we won't be completely left out in the cold.
Incidentally, msnbc also has some coverage. A disinterested and impartial news source if there ever were one... or not, as it were.
If only this research had been done sooner
on
Lightning Research
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· Score: 1
Uman and his team pull lightning bolts down from storm clouds by firing rockets that function similarly to Ben Franklin's kite. Each rocket trails a wire more than 1,000 feet high, which attracts lightning from miles up and sends it down to the ground. A few feet away, the researchers watch the fireworks from the safety of a laboratory building.
If only we'd had this unmanned technology sooner, then so many Furbies wouldn't have been lost in the name of science.
Elizabethian English is a good proof of concept, but we should build on this success with other more practical languages.
Natural-language programming has had its ups and downs over the year. Some will recall Hypertalk, for example, as the language the original Myst game was programmed in. Only some will recall, however, inasmuch as it never got terribly far off the ground. Other natural languages haven't faired much better.
My contention, however, is that these efforts have not failed because the idea of natural-language programming is somehow fundamentally flawed. Nay, the problem is that we're busy trying to implement the wrong language: English. English may be the language lots of us speak, but it's simultaneously too imprecise to permit of exacting programming and too verbose to allow structures to be implemented quickly and cleanly.
Tok Pisin would make a much better natural language to implement. It has several important advantages over English:
Simple grammar
English-based lexicon for backwards vocabulary compatibility
Full extensibility, owing to its pidgin origins.
As yet, a language like Tok Pisin would encounter much opposition among programmers and speakers in the population at large unaccustomed to change, but it's a proposal deserving of serious examination.
According to Reuters, India plans to subsidize television sets so couples can sit back and watch television instead of having sex and contributing to India's burgeoning population.
That's the kind of news I'd expect to hear from adequacy.org, but it's gotten me thinking: if mere television can be successful, then how much better would India's public funds be spent on TiVo instead? Television can be watched at length, but there's a limit to the amount of interactivity. With TiVo, couples would not only be watching more television than they'd previously wanted to (because of the convenience TiVo offers in recording shows otherwise missed); they'd spend additional numbers of hours every year fiddling with options and programming their device.
If there are any Indians in the audience, I encourage you to write your representative in parliament and encourage him or her to consider TiVo instead of television. Thousands of geeks use it, and they're having less sex than perhaps any other segment of our population. The choice is clear.
The problem is not the modem, the problem is the virus. Qwest is not crediting for the virus.
What Qwest clearly fails to comprehend is that, by choosing the tools they did, which have a known history of virus vulnerability, they are responsible for the reprocussions.
It's a well-settled legal principle that persons are held responsible for the actions of their agents when those agents act in the furtherance of their employers' wishes and in a manner not contradictory to responsible behavior.
Microsoft and Cisco perhaps should be held independently responsible for their failings here, but it certainly does not follow that Qwest ought be absolved of all duty to its customers.
The rationale behind such a legal relationship is readily apparent. The customers have their dealings with Qwest.
The customers often are not provided the opportunity to inquire into the methods Qwest is using to provide customers with services.
And even when they are, there is no reasonable expectation that these subcontractors will listen to these end customers. (After all, their customers aren't Qwest's customers. Their customer is Qwest alone.)
But Qwest has no real reason to complain to Microsoft and Cisco, since Qwest can simply pass the costs on to their consumers as they're trying to do here.
In the end, consumers are shafted, and everyone else profits.
Only by extending legal reliability up the foodchain to people making the final decision can we attempt to ensure that moronic decisions like these accurately produce the reprocussions for decision-makers that consumers feel.
They Circuit Court didn't rule a breakup unjustifiable. It ruled that Jackson exhibited poor faith in how he went about choosing it as a remedy -- that he showed bias in the various Microsoft motions he denied and the inappropriate extralegal comments he made.
When the case goes back to the district court level, the new judge can choose a breakup remedy anew.
The Supreme Court hasn't exactly been lying low since the Bush v. Gore fiasco, but they they're not going to touch this one with a ten-foot pole. There's just no need for them to do so.
The Supreme Court's docket is entirely discretionary. They only hear a couple hundred cases every year, out of the thousands that get submitted. It takes years for a case to make its way up to the Supreme Court from the lower courts precisely because the Supreme Court's policy is to let all lower remedies get completely exhausted first and to let all the difficult legal issues receive one or two decisions from below.
They might someday hear a Microsoft antitrust case, but it's not going to be this one right now. Why would they jump into the fray now before the breakup measures are even decided? The case is even dimmer for Microsoft in light of the unanimous circuit court ruling. It's not unheard of for the Supreme Court to overturn a unanimous ruling, but they've almost never gone out on a limb and done so when there were alternatives like waiting for the wheels of justice to turn some more.
Instead of focusing on the Supreme Court, we should be focusing again on the upcoming battles in the district court. While it's decided that Microsoft is guilty of antitrust violations, whether that fact will create any lasting legal or economic ramifications has yet to be seen. It still could go either way: they could be broken up and fined, or they could just get another slap on the wrist with another toothless consent decree.
And with the possibility still open that Microsoft and the DOJ could settle out of court, well, we've got bigger things to worry about.
Two years ago, the FSF's business model of giving the product away in order to increase market share was all the rage. The power of the internet had lifted internet stocks into the stratosphere, and the world had attained a pervasive shade of what can only be described as "rosy".
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and so the tech bubble burst. Some key players such as AOL had managed to leverage their inflated stock prices and buy up some meatspace companies like Time/Warner. It doesn't appear the FSF took advantage of whatever opportunity it may have had to do so.
My question is this: how has the collapse of the technology sector changed the FSF's business plan? Companies that formerly gave their products away for free are now charging a price (such as Britanica.com). Does the FSF have any plans to start charging as well?
Most tech companies have seen massive layoffs with the realization that it is simply not feasible to maintain a hundred/thousand-man developer base. The FSF claims to have a base far in excess of even these most optimistic of companies. Do you have any plans to cut back on your headcount?
And the few companies that haven't actually laid off their staff have asked their programmers to take a big paycut and participate in unpaid-leave programs. Does the FSF plan to follow suit?
I've been running the numbers, and I just can't see how the FSF's small capitalization and dwindling revenues can keep up in the fast-paced cut-throat economy of tomorrow. Will the FSF's ship be steered off its path to destruction? Or are you merely content to stick your collective heads in the sand and hope for the best?
I love the idea of wearables. I'm sure most people who are at all acquainted with technology feel that way. But I'm afraid I don't see the market for them at this juncture.
Just look at the pda market. Palm and Handspring are on their last legs; Apple killed its Newton project; Sony's deriving some marketing value from putting its brand on every dog turd in sight but hasn't made much revenues. What the wearables market is supposed to be two years from now is what the pda market ought to have been two years ago, but instead we're left with a collapsing industry.
For the most part, people don't want to be chained to a machine of any sort. They'll spend obscene amounts of money on a computer they can shove under their desk, but they can't bear to carry one in their back pocket. To draw another analogy, look at the cellphone market. A few years ago, everyone was all excited about having one. Today, people purposefully leave theirs at home so they don't have to be just a phonecall away from the office.
Frankly, it'll be at least a decade before people start being amenable to the idea of integrating technological augmentations into their own personal space like that -- about how long it'll take for the generation weaned on mainstream internet usage to have an income to buy these things with. Before then, I'm just not holding my breath.
It's all about perception of invincibility
on
Breaking Windows
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· Score: 5, Insightful
We all know that Microsoft is king of marketing, but even more important than marketing your product to consumers is marketing your image (an image of invincibility) to your competitors.
To pick an inappropriate example, look at the former Soviet Union. They suffered numerous political, economic, and technological setbacks, but how many did we hear about in the west? In 1960, no one in the US knew that almost a hundred people died on the pad of a failed R-16 ICBM launch (the Nedelin Disaster). Half the arms buildup during the 1980s stemmed from a misconception about Russia's actual military capability. Frankly, they did a great job of marketing their image towards us.
If Microsoft appears suitably invincible, then all sorts of things just fall into their laps instead of requiring effort on their part to obtain. Competitors are more likely to get out of their way when a vaporware product is announced. Even lawenforcement is likely to give a good hard second look before diving headfirst into a prolonged legal battle. There is no downside.
Does it surprise me that any of this internal strife has occurred? Hardly. Does it surprise me that it's rarely come toight. Again, hardly. That's just the way these things go.
From 1998 to 1999, the Mars Global Surveyor made some 27 million topographical measurements of the red planet. With an average accuracy of 13 meters and sometimes as good as 2 meters. That's not much more than my height.
Of course, having that precision on Earth would be more difficult with our thicker atmosphere and would raise profound privacy issues. On the other hand, government spy satellites probably routinely attain that precision without anyone's batting an eyelash. Maybe it's just as well that a civilian agency get in on the action too.
I'm not questioning his qualifications as majority leader. I'm only pointing out how even though South Dakota has merely a population of 754,844, it is a senator from South Dakota who is setting the agenda for the entire United States (population 272,691,000).
The same is true in the House, though to a lesser extent. Missouri and Michigan don't have the biggest populations (California, New York, Texas, Illinois, etc.), and yet those are the states where the chief Democratic leaders (Gephardt and Bonior) are from. The House is supposed to allocate influence and power according to population, and yet it is instead being allocated according to other factors such as seniority.
The thing about congressional petitions is, they work if you pick the district of an important-enough congressman to target, especially if his seat isn't contested one and he has more leeway than others to take on new initiatives.
The nature of federal districting is that, while states with small populations have few seats in the House, the ratio of citizens/congressman in those states is larger than in others. But while the populations may be small, the political clout wielded by that congressman may be disproportionately large. Daschle is a bad example since he's a Senator, but it's not an anomoly that a politician from South Dakota can end up running the show.
All it takes is one congressman championing your cause, and you have your foot in the door. The nature of partisan horsetrading is that a single politician can get his hobbyhorse enacted in order to win his vote on other issues. Exon's Communications Decency Act didn't have broad political support, but it got inserted into the Telecommuinications Act of 1996 all the same, as part of such a deal. It's all the easier when the cause is one that has vocal public support and few proponents except among enforcement agencies. They listen to enforcement agencies, but they're elected by the people, so when push comes to shove, politicians will surprisingly side with the latter more than you'd think.
Harddrive swapping was a good idea three years ago, but the support hadn't really come through from the industry. Today's a different question entirely.
Now that I've gotten a few nicklocks, I can
Keep a mirror drive handy when the one I do my development on dies.
Bring my code with me without having to juggle zipdisks or upload enormous files.
Use Linux on standard machine configurations without having to repartition the local harddisk or otherwise disturb my friends' computers much.
I honestly can't speak highly enough about them. Of course it hasn't solve all the problems with IRQ conflicts I run into, but it is a step in the right direction and a welcome addition to my home computing environment.
Integrating gold with online fiat-currency transactions is a nice start, but it hardly goes far enough. It's time to go back on the gold standard for good.
When the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution, the fundamental property rights it embodies were rooted in actual intrinsicly valuable commodities. When the Federal government took your land under the 5th amendment, they had to compensate you in gold. Even well into the end of the 19th century, the biggest hotbutton currency debate concerned minting silver instead of gold.
Today, we're off the gold and silver standards altogether. This is truly sad. Instead of being able to predict how much a dollar will be worth tomorrow, we leave that decision up to the whims of international currency daytraders. It's little surprise that inflation rates under the Carter administration crested well over 10% so soon after Nixon pulled us out of Vietnam and took us off the gold standard.
The economy of the twentyfirst century cannot withstand uncertainties. The technological revolutions of the industrial age all occurred under the gold standard. Why should we experiment with a proven thing? Why let politicians pay off their political debts by devaluing our currency? Brazil went down that path, and we needn't follow.
In today's economic climate, the prudent investor will consider converting at least part of his or her paper assets into precious metals. Right now, with metal prices at a fraction of their all-time highs, may be an ideal time to invest in precious metals. The Gold Vienna Philharmonic sets the standard in purity and popularity. And with the exclusive Monex buy-back guarantee, your gold investment can only maintain or increase in value for one year, which adds a unique benefit to your gold purchase. Sign up today and receive a free copy of Gold In The Age Of Uncertainty.
It's sad to see dot-com workers lining up for spots in homeless shelters, since such spots are scarce enough as it is. There must be a better answer, and I think I've found it:
It's time to resurrect the modern leper colony.
Today, Molokai island stands as a pristine isle off the coast of Hawaii's main island. Well into the 20th century, people who had contracted Hansen's disease (leprosy) were corralled and left to fend for themselves apart from the rest of civilization. Though the leper colony became obsolete with the advent of modern antibiotics, it remains a powerful idea with a powerful purpose.
Geeks are little different from lepers, when you look at it. Both suffer from an incurable disease (at least in classic times), both are shunned by mainstream society, and both are wont to have random body parts die and fall off. A leper colony for geeks would be the natural and proper solution.
But how to get them there? Unlike in ancient times, we can't just throw them on a boat and leave them off on the shores. We need strong incentives. Part of the job is already done for us: Hawaii's pristine beauty and untrampled (except by zillions of tourists) lands are unparalleled in popularity and acclaim. Advertised as an island getaway, the leper colony could attract a large number of geeks on that fact alone. The rest of the mopping up could be done with promises of excesses of bandwidth and numerous sexually available local fauna.
Once isolated, the geeklepers would live out their natural lives. Since we all know geeks don't have sex, we needn't fear the propagation of their species. After one or two decades, the last remains of an unwashed mass of pimpled sociopaths could be collected and used as compost.
Above all, homeless shelters would again be free to admit truly down-and-out members of society who didn't go to expensive colleges and didn't recently live in the lap of luxury. That is a world worth fighting for.
Thirty years ago, sure. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, the civilized world plus Yorkshire was a bleak and desolate place devoid of joy and humor. But why do people still find Monty Python funny today?
There's been a whole lot of progress in the last thirty years. Monty Python may have been pioneers of a sort, and they sure made the BBC cringe like no one had before. But do they really hold a candle to Full House or Pee Wee's Great Adventure or any of the other brilliant programs that have followed? No.
It says a lot more about geek culture than about the quality of Monty Python's work that they've persisted as long as they have. Geeks, though they pretend to be iconoclasts on the cutting edge of technological and cultural revolutions, are really as conservative and scared of change as the people they deride. They cling to Monty Python, because they can feel rest assured that their adulation is justified, that Monty Python is officially and canonically funny. The fact that millions of scraggly geeks with crunchy socks have memorized the exact same jokes and the exact same non sequitors doesn't detract from Monty Python's appeal. Indeed, it only reinforces its appeal, since it gives geeks the sense of community and brotherhood they crave so much for not having it in the real world.
Monty Python's back in the theatres, eh? Well, I think I'll sit this one by. I've already seen the Holy Grail once or twice on my trips to the middle east, so why would I want to see it again in the theatres? If you ask me, Monty Python's sun has already set.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the academic folks I know have had a bit of trouble installing Linux/390 (<----- ibm's linux/390 developer page), but linux390.marist.edu/ has a decent manual they've found helpful.
Of course, it'll long be obsolete before I ever get my hands on one of these beasts. *sigh*
By which I mean the federalism issues raised on all sides. The current administration supposedly believes very strongly in principles of federalism. The current supreme court has come down recently in favor of federalism. So the Federal government will just do its thing and let the states go ahead and do their thing, right?
Unfortunately, no. If there's one thing the current administration believes even more strongly in than federalism is political power to override such matters of principle when a pet interest is implicated. If the feds aren't going to break Microsoft up, you can bet they're going to do everything in their power to make sure that their will isn't obviated by some ragtag liberal states like New York or California (both of which voted for Gore).
It's going to be one hell of a political grudge match ahead. The trenches have already been dug; we'll have to see who's the first to start lobbing chlorine gas.
Whenever booms like these arise, it's a great opportunity for students to cast down the shackles of academia and strike it out on their own. For years, it was entirely possible for young people to forgo college careers altogether and give of themselves fully in the high-tech industry.
But now that it's over and they're coming back to academia, the viscious cycle begins anew. These students, once they graduate, will have both classroom experience and real-world experience, and it'll simply raise the bar for everyone else. The choice for students arrived from outside the dotcom market will be between either taking time off and taking significant internships during their student years or simply go for more education (most will choose the latter). It'll be an upward spiral of higher education begetting better qualified workers begetting a need for higher education.
That's why it's critical, now more than ever, that we abolish universal education. Darwinian sociology tells us that the best will lead no matter what their headstart, so we should do away with unnecessary artificial government intervention in the education markets. Starting from a young age, children should be given strong incentives to go into factory work or indentured servitude, thereby setting a sufficient hurdle that only the truly motivated will enter primary and higher education.
The dotcom boom and bust was an important economic moment in history, but let's not let ourselves lose track of the bigger picture. Education is, one of the most important determining factors in people's quality of life, but we must not allow ourselves to overvalue its function or be irresponsible in its delivery.
There will always be a place for young people to go instead of university. The sooner we pull out of this economic slump, the better for these people.
What kind of compatibility are we talking about here? Is this a fully functioning version of Outlook? What I mean is, if I equip my entire production staff with these devices, can I expect to lose billions of dollars with full compatibility with Outlook viruses? I have to ask, because a few billion here and a few billion there really make a difference, you know, and if my company doesn't start losing time and money like our competitors, then my job as CIO just isn't secure.
I think I'll wait and see until Microsoft promises 100% Outlook virus compatibility. Call me conservative, but that's my honest judgment.
Everyone, sing after me:
Let's slap together a bunch of features onto a product never intended to provide them!
Let's win this battle on the marketing field rather than the technical merits!
Let's leverage our existing monopolies to create new ones!
What's the "SB" in USB stand for? Serial Bus? No! Super Bandwidth!
Microsoft isn't going with USB 2.0; that alone should give pause. And what's the roadmap for the future? A present negligible superiority is all well and good for the moment, but how much can they expect to increase it as IEEE 1394 plods ahead? Not terribly much.
*Sigh*
While Compaq hasn't done much with Alpha since it bought out Digital, there was always that hope that something new would eventually come out. Alpha was a lovely chipset for all of its thermal and pricing issues (which could've been solved by a company with more drive and fewer pitfalls than Digital/Compaq had.)
But now that HP is buying Compaq, any life that could've possibly been breathed back into Alpha is completely dissipated. HP is firmly in bed with Intel on the Itanium line (fronting cash, codevelopment, independent liscensing, etc.) Whereas Compaq hadn't had much incentive to improve Alpha, HP has exactly zero interest, since that would mean directly competing with and undermining the success of Itanium.
The polite course of action would be to release Alpha completely into the public domain, but that's a farcically utopian request. I'm just always saddened when competition is reduced and choices are constrained. Let's just hope Apple and the PPC line don't go bust in the near future, leaving us with absolutely no alternative to Intel's offerings (which are beginning to look more and more like crap as the years pass) and AMD's parallel offerings in the same architecture.
Just last month, Microsoft changed the service agreement for their passport system to require only an email address and password to sign up. Did Microsoft do this without any armtwisting? No. Did they do it, though? Yes.
Just keep the pressure on them up. They're going to go ahead with some sort of service no matter what, but the amount of opposition they face now will determine how many of these concessions will be made "voluntarily". That way, even if the FTC doesn't come down with a favorable ruling, we won't be completely left out in the cold.
Incidentally, msnbc also has some coverage. A disinterested and impartial news source if there ever were one... or not, as it were.
If only we'd had this unmanned technology sooner, then so many Furbies wouldn't have been lost in the name of science.
Natural-language programming has had its ups and downs over the year. Some will recall Hypertalk, for example, as the language the original Myst game was programmed in. Only some will recall, however, inasmuch as it never got terribly far off the ground. Other natural languages haven't faired much better.
My contention, however, is that these efforts have not failed because the idea of natural-language programming is somehow fundamentally flawed. Nay, the problem is that we're busy trying to implement the wrong language: English. English may be the language lots of us speak, but it's simultaneously too imprecise to permit of exacting programming and too verbose to allow structures to be implemented quickly and cleanly.
Tok Pisin would make a much better natural language to implement. It has several important advantages over English:
As yet, a language like Tok Pisin would encounter much opposition among programmers and speakers in the population at large unaccustomed to change, but it's a proposal deserving of serious examination.
Keep in mind not everyone agrees with that sentiment. Some would argue that, if you discount the numerous security issues, Microsoft has perhaps the strongest track record of innovation in the industry. <----- Read it and see what I mean.
We know it's bunk. They ought to know it's bunk, and yet they don't.
sigh.
According to Reuters, India plans to subsidize television sets so couples can sit back and watch television instead of having sex and contributing to India's burgeoning population.
That's the kind of news I'd expect to hear from adequacy.org, but it's gotten me thinking: if mere television can be successful, then how much better would India's public funds be spent on TiVo instead? Television can be watched at length, but there's a limit to the amount of interactivity. With TiVo, couples would not only be watching more television than they'd previously wanted to (because of the convenience TiVo offers in recording shows otherwise missed); they'd spend additional numbers of hours every year fiddling with options and programming their device.
If there are any Indians in the audience, I encourage you to write your representative in parliament and encourage him or her to consider TiVo instead of television. Thousands of geeks use it, and they're having less sex than perhaps any other segment of our population. The choice is clear.
What Qwest clearly fails to comprehend is that, by choosing the tools they did, which have a known history of virus vulnerability, they are responsible for the reprocussions.
It's a well-settled legal principle that persons are held responsible for the actions of their agents when those agents act in the furtherance of their employers' wishes and in a manner not contradictory to responsible behavior.
Microsoft and Cisco perhaps should be held independently responsible for their failings here, but it certainly does not follow that Qwest ought be absolved of all duty to its customers.
The rationale behind such a legal relationship is readily apparent. The customers have their dealings with Qwest.
The customers often are not provided the opportunity to inquire into the methods Qwest is using to provide customers with services.
And even when they are, there is no reasonable expectation that these subcontractors will listen to these end customers. (After all, their customers aren't Qwest's customers. Their customer is Qwest alone.)
But Qwest has no real reason to complain to Microsoft and Cisco, since Qwest can simply pass the costs on to their consumers as they're trying to do here.
In the end, consumers are shafted, and everyone else profits.
Only by extending legal reliability up the foodchain to people making the final decision can we attempt to ensure that moronic decisions like these accurately produce the reprocussions for decision-makers that consumers feel.
They Circuit Court didn't rule a breakup unjustifiable. It ruled that Jackson exhibited poor faith in how he went about choosing it as a remedy -- that he showed bias in the various Microsoft motions he denied and the inappropriate extralegal comments he made.
When the case goes back to the district court level, the new judge can choose a breakup remedy anew.
The Supreme Court hasn't exactly been lying low since the Bush v. Gore fiasco, but they they're not going to touch this one with a ten-foot pole. There's just no need for them to do so.
The Supreme Court's docket is entirely discretionary. They only hear a couple hundred cases every year, out of the thousands that get submitted. It takes years for a case to make its way up to the Supreme Court from the lower courts precisely because the Supreme Court's policy is to let all lower remedies get completely exhausted first and to let all the difficult legal issues receive one or two decisions from below.
They might someday hear a Microsoft antitrust case, but it's not going to be this one right now. Why would they jump into the fray now before the breakup measures are even decided? The case is even dimmer for Microsoft in light of the unanimous circuit court ruling. It's not unheard of for the Supreme Court to overturn a unanimous ruling, but they've almost never gone out on a limb and done so when there were alternatives like waiting for the wheels of justice to turn some more.
Instead of focusing on the Supreme Court, we should be focusing again on the upcoming battles in the district court. While it's decided that Microsoft is guilty of antitrust violations, whether that fact will create any lasting legal or economic ramifications has yet to be seen. It still could go either way: they could be broken up and fined, or they could just get another slap on the wrist with another toothless consent decree.
And with the possibility still open that Microsoft and the DOJ could settle out of court, well, we've got bigger things to worry about.
Two years ago, the FSF's business model of giving the product away in order to increase market share was all the rage. The power of the internet had lifted internet stocks into the stratosphere, and the world had attained a pervasive shade of what can only be described as "rosy".
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and so the tech bubble burst. Some key players such as AOL had managed to leverage their inflated stock prices and buy up some meatspace companies like Time/Warner. It doesn't appear the FSF took advantage of whatever opportunity it may have had to do so.
My question is this: how has the collapse of the technology sector changed the FSF's business plan? Companies that formerly gave their products away for free are now charging a price (such as Britanica.com). Does the FSF have any plans to start charging as well?
Most tech companies have seen massive layoffs with the realization that it is simply not feasible to maintain a hundred/thousand-man developer base. The FSF claims to have a base far in excess of even these most optimistic of companies. Do you have any plans to cut back on your headcount?
And the few companies that haven't actually laid off their staff have asked their programmers to take a big paycut and participate in unpaid-leave programs. Does the FSF plan to follow suit?
I've been running the numbers, and I just can't see how the FSF's small capitalization and dwindling revenues can keep up in the fast-paced cut-throat economy of tomorrow. Will the FSF's ship be steered off its path to destruction? Or are you merely content to stick your collective heads in the sand and hope for the best?
I love the idea of wearables. I'm sure most people who are at all acquainted with technology feel that way. But I'm afraid I don't see the market for them at this juncture.
Just look at the pda market. Palm and Handspring are on their last legs; Apple killed its Newton project; Sony's deriving some marketing value from putting its brand on every dog turd in sight but hasn't made much revenues. What the wearables market is supposed to be two years from now is what the pda market ought to have been two years ago, but instead we're left with a collapsing industry.
For the most part, people don't want to be chained to a machine of any sort. They'll spend obscene amounts of money on a computer they can shove under their desk, but they can't bear to carry one in their back pocket. To draw another analogy, look at the cellphone market. A few years ago, everyone was all excited about having one. Today, people purposefully leave theirs at home so they don't have to be just a phonecall away from the office.
Frankly, it'll be at least a decade before people start being amenable to the idea of integrating technological augmentations into their own personal space like that -- about how long it'll take for the generation weaned on mainstream internet usage to have an income to buy these things with. Before then, I'm just not holding my breath.
We all know that Microsoft is king of marketing, but even more important than marketing your product to consumers is marketing your image (an image of invincibility) to your competitors.
To pick an inappropriate example, look at the former Soviet Union. They suffered numerous political, economic, and technological setbacks, but how many did we hear about in the west? In 1960, no one in the US knew that almost a hundred people died on the pad of a failed R-16 ICBM launch (the Nedelin Disaster). Half the arms buildup during the 1980s stemmed from a misconception about Russia's actual military capability. Frankly, they did a great job of marketing their image towards us.
If Microsoft appears suitably invincible, then all sorts of things just fall into their laps instead of requiring effort on their part to obtain. Competitors are more likely to get out of their way when a vaporware product is announced. Even lawenforcement is likely to give a good hard second look before diving headfirst into a prolonged legal battle. There is no downside.
Does it surprise me that any of this internal strife has occurred? Hardly. Does it surprise me that it's rarely come toight. Again, hardly. That's just the way these things go.
Adequacy.org ran the article Open Letter to Channel 4: Brass Eye Was Unacceptable , denouncing Channel4 and BrassEye for these escapades.
If you want a good summary of the opposition, then I'd suggest reading it. It's a good read in any event.
It's odd that NASA is only now getting around to do with the Earth what they've been doing with Mars for years. (Follow that link for the pretty pictures, if nothing else.
From 1998 to 1999, the Mars Global Surveyor made some 27 million topographical measurements of the red planet. With an average accuracy of 13 meters and sometimes as good as 2 meters. That's not much more than my height.
Of course, having that precision on Earth would be more difficult with our thicker atmosphere and would raise profound privacy issues. On the other hand, government spy satellites probably routinely attain that precision without anyone's batting an eyelash. Maybe it's just as well that a civilian agency get in on the action too.
The same is true in the House, though to a lesser extent. Missouri and Michigan don't have the biggest populations (California, New York, Texas, Illinois, etc.), and yet those are the states where the chief Democratic leaders (Gephardt and Bonior) are from. The House is supposed to allocate influence and power according to population, and yet it is instead being allocated according to other factors such as seniority.
The thing about congressional petitions is, they work if you pick the district of an important-enough congressman to target, especially if his seat isn't contested one and he has more leeway than others to take on new initiatives.
The nature of federal districting is that, while states with small populations have few seats in the House, the ratio of citizens/congressman in those states is larger than in others. But while the populations may be small, the political clout wielded by that congressman may be disproportionately large. Daschle is a bad example since he's a Senator, but it's not an anomoly that a politician from South Dakota can end up running the show.
All it takes is one congressman championing your cause, and you have your foot in the door. The nature of partisan horsetrading is that a single politician can get his hobbyhorse enacted in order to win his vote on other issues. Exon's Communications Decency Act didn't have broad political support, but it got inserted into the Telecommuinications Act of 1996 all the same, as part of such a deal. It's all the easier when the cause is one that has vocal public support and few proponents except among enforcement agencies. They listen to enforcement agencies, but they're elected by the people, so when push comes to shove, politicians will surprisingly side with the latter more than you'd think.
Now that I've gotten a few nicklocks, I can
I honestly can't speak highly enough about them. Of course it hasn't solve all the problems with IRQ conflicts I run into, but it is a step in the right direction and a welcome addition to my home computing environment.
The only site on the Internet that gets it right.
Integrating gold with online fiat-currency transactions is a nice start, but it hardly goes far enough. It's time to go back on the gold standard for good.
When the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution, the fundamental property rights it embodies were rooted in actual intrinsicly valuable commodities. When the Federal government took your land under the 5th amendment, they had to compensate you in gold. Even well into the end of the 19th century, the biggest hotbutton currency debate concerned minting silver instead of gold.
Today, we're off the gold and silver standards altogether. This is truly sad. Instead of being able to predict how much a dollar will be worth tomorrow, we leave that decision up to the whims of international currency daytraders. It's little surprise that inflation rates under the Carter administration crested well over 10% so soon after Nixon pulled us out of Vietnam and took us off the gold standard.
The economy of the twentyfirst century cannot withstand uncertainties. The technological revolutions of the industrial age all occurred under the gold standard. Why should we experiment with a proven thing? Why let politicians pay off their political debts by devaluing our currency? Brazil went down that path, and we needn't follow.
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It's sad to see dot-com workers lining up for spots in homeless shelters, since such spots are scarce enough as it is. There must be a better answer, and I think I've found it:
It's time to resurrect the modern leper colony.
Today, Molokai island stands as a pristine isle off the coast of Hawaii's main island. Well into the 20th century, people who had contracted Hansen's disease (leprosy) were corralled and left to fend for themselves apart from the rest of civilization. Though the leper colony became obsolete with the advent of modern antibiotics, it remains a powerful idea with a powerful purpose.
Geeks are little different from lepers, when you look at it. Both suffer from an incurable disease (at least in classic times), both are shunned by mainstream society, and both are wont to have random body parts die and fall off. A leper colony for geeks would be the natural and proper solution.
But how to get them there? Unlike in ancient times, we can't just throw them on a boat and leave them off on the shores. We need strong incentives. Part of the job is already done for us: Hawaii's pristine beauty and untrampled (except by zillions of tourists) lands are unparalleled in popularity and acclaim. Advertised as an island getaway, the leper colony could attract a large number of geeks on that fact alone. The rest of the mopping up could be done with promises of excesses of bandwidth and numerous sexually available local fauna.
Once isolated, the geeklepers would live out their natural lives. Since we all know geeks don't have sex, we needn't fear the propagation of their species. After one or two decades, the last remains of an unwashed mass of pimpled sociopaths could be collected and used as compost.
Above all, homeless shelters would again be free to admit truly down-and-out members of society who didn't go to expensive colleges and didn't recently live in the lap of luxury. That is a world worth fighting for.
Thirty years ago, sure. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, the civilized world plus Yorkshire was a bleak and desolate place devoid of joy and humor. But why do people still find Monty Python funny today?
There's been a whole lot of progress in the last thirty years. Monty Python may have been pioneers of a sort, and they sure made the BBC cringe like no one had before. But do they really hold a candle to Full House or Pee Wee's Great Adventure or any of the other brilliant programs that have followed? No.
It says a lot more about geek culture than about the quality of Monty Python's work that they've persisted as long as they have. Geeks, though they pretend to be iconoclasts on the cutting edge of technological and cultural revolutions, are really as conservative and scared of change as the people they deride. They cling to Monty Python, because they can feel rest assured that their adulation is justified, that Monty Python is officially and canonically funny. The fact that millions of scraggly geeks with crunchy socks have memorized the exact same jokes and the exact same non sequitors doesn't detract from Monty Python's appeal. Indeed, it only reinforces its appeal, since it gives geeks the sense of community and brotherhood they crave so much for not having it in the real world.
Monty Python's back in the theatres, eh? Well, I think I'll sit this one by. I've already seen the Holy Grail once or twice on my trips to the middle east, so why would I want to see it again in the theatres? If you ask me, Monty Python's sun has already set.